Friday, April 1, 2011

In the past few decades, vampires have undergone quite a revival. Recently, the tide seems to be turning to armies of walking-dead zombies, but the blood-sucking undead have a lengthy literary head start on those slow-moving flesh eaters. From Anne Rice's Lestat to Charlaine Harris's Bill Compton to Stephenie Meyer's Edward Cullen, the sexy ancestors of Vlad The Impaler continue to prove that bat-wings and fangs are all it takes to woo a fair maiden into surrendering her virtue in the nearest coffin.

But a 2011 collection of little known vampire stories, dating from 1679 through 1897, reminds us that the current vamp vogue "didn't descend upon us out of the blue...most of our knowledge of them is based on rules laid down by Bram Stoker's 1897 masterpiece Dracula, and the little-known writings of his Victorian-era predecessors." Edited by "vampire experts" Richard Dalby and Robert Eighteen-Bisang,Vintage Vampire Stories from Skyhorse Publishing collects, for the first time in a single volume, seventeen obscure, pre-Dracula tales of Victorian bloodlust.

As the volume's press release notes, "Long lost to the public in the pages of defunct newspapers, out of print magazines, and dusty nineteenth century anthologies, the thrilling tales in Vintage Vampire Stories ooze with sinister characters in malevolent worlds." The anthology also includes a taste of "Bram Stoker's Original Foundation Notes And Data For His Dracula," via three photographs of individual pages from the 1890 manuscript of what was originally entitled Count Vampire, held by Philadelphia's Rosenbach Museum and Library. Booktryst readers may be familiar with Eighteen-Bisang's 2008 examination of every page in that source material, Bram Stoker's Notes For Dracula: A Facsimile Edition, written with Elizabeth Miller.

The fantastically-named Eighteen-Bisang runs a Canadian publishing house called Transylvania Press. (Three guesses at to what his specialty is, and the first two don't count.) He bill's himself as "owner of the world's largest private collection of vampire books." According to a 2008 interview with Canada.com, "He has about 2,500 vampire books - some extremely rare, including a first edition review copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula - as well as 2,000 comic books, 1,000 magazines and well over a hundred films." But his life-long delight in collecting "Vampiriana" began quite by accident.

As Eighteen-Bisang tells it, he was perusing the shelves at one of his favorite used bookstores, when he was distracted by a "really cute little girl with red hair" sobbing at the front of the store. She was surrounded by three large boxes of books, and "begging with the owner" to buy them from her. When Eighteen-Bisang asked her what was wrong she said, "I need $100, and I've got well over $1,000 worth of books here and this idiot won't give me $100 for them, he offered me $25 for them..." Hoping to help her out, Eighteen-Bisang bought the books sight unseen for her asking price. The titles turned out to be all vampire books--some, valuable first editions. "I didn't know if I'd done something smart or I'd been taken for a sucker - no pun intended," he recalled. But once he examined the books, he was bitten by the collecting bug (or in this case collecting-bat) and a lifetime in the shadow of the vampire had begun.

Questioned about the seemingly endless pop-culture and high culture obsession with the vampire, Eighteen-Bisang attributes it to the universal appeal of the genre, "The vampire is the ultimate teenager. Dracula is the toughest guy in the class, gets all of the women. He would be the coolest teenager in the world if he had a fast car, but he doesn't, but he's got a coffin, so he gets kind-of brownie points for the coffin. Women like the tall, dark handsome stranger or they like the 'bad boy.' Older people like the promise of renewed life in immortality, and the young kids like the scary bat stories. It's the only genre I know that actually reaches out to everyone. It's really unique in that way."

If he ever tires of collecting tales of the undead, Eighteen-Bisang says his inclination would be to turn to assembling a new library of volumes related to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. "Just a change in the energy, from the dark..."

Thanks to Nina Boutsikaris of Skyhorse Publishing for the review copy of Vintage Vampire Stories.